K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

Revisiting the tabbed desktop

One of the things I had time to try, but didn’t have time to write about, was a revisit to someone else’s idea. I do that quite often, now that I think about it.

This time it was urukrama’s tabbed desktop from a couple of years ago. Things like that tend to roll around in my mind, and then bubble up after a while.

I caught myself thinking the other day that screen’s status bar, while it doesn’t seem to like to be pushed to the top of the display, could do some reverse-text codes, and make it look like tabs.

You might have to use your imagination here, but if the active “window” is set to the same color as the terminal background, then if you squint really hard and hold your breath, it looks like a tab. See? See? :P

Playing with that for a few minutes sent me back to urukrama’s desktop, which did a better job with tint2 and Openbox than I was doing with screen alone.

That’s rather rudimentary, and not really much of an improvement over the grace and style of urukrama’s original work.

And most of it was slapped together with tint2’s onboard wizard (the aptly named tintwizard.py), which makes things much, much easier. I’d like to find something along those same lines for Openbox itself.

But I haven’t saved the configuration files here because it wasn’t much of an accomplishment, and because it only took a few minutes to arrange what you see.

And really, if I’m going to rely on a tab-like interface to a long string of terminal programs, then there are better ways to arrange it. Probably. :)